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Apple Tv 3rd Gen with Synology DS214play

K

Kennarded

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 8, 2014
2
0
London
Hello All,
As a newby synology ds214play owner, I was wondering if anyone can provide instructions to setup with Apple TV for streaming of my movies?
 
There is a hack that will allow you to access a plex server from AppleTV - search for Plex on Apple TV to find instructions - but it is a hack, not standard operations for the ATv.

To just use the ATv as it is intended, you need to have iTunes running on a Mac or Windows PC. So in this case, you just put your library on a share, mount the share on your computer and then add files to iTunes Library from that location.

The "iTunes Server" on Synology (or any other NAS device) does NOT work with AppleTv. It just creates a shared iTunes Library, it does not do Home Sharing.

You can move your library to the NAS share from within iTunes, or you can configure iTunes to not copy media to it's default location and just have a link to the file that exists on the NAS.

Be careful with using a NAS with iTunes. You need to make sure that the share is mounted BEFORE launching iTunes, or chaos will ensue.
 
NOPE.

the 214play has a hardware transcoder so you do not need Plex. Just download the Synology app on your ios device and launch it. It will connect to your synology on your network. The app will let the 214play airplay directly to the apple tv
 
Kennarded said:
Hello All,
As a newby synology ds214play owner, I was wondering if anyone can provide instructions to setup with Apple TV for streaming of my movies?
Click to expand...

Assuming you have another iOS device you can do as 2010mini stated, but otherwise you have to do the Plex Connect "hack" to get Plex to work. There is no way to do home sharing from the Synology. It's one of the reasons why I haven't found a need for a NAS at my house. I can't seem to find any valid reason to spend a bunch of money on something that a Mini with a DAS already does and the Mini w/ DAS gives me greater flexibility (especially considering the low power nature of the Mini at idle). Heck I use Plex running on my Mini and that I could setup directly on a NAS, but it would take a long time to recoup the cost of the NAS with any power savings with using a NAS instead of a Mini and I give up a LOT of flexibility (I use OSX Server for Caching updates, Centralized Time Machine, etc. etc.).
 
The Apple TV was a gift and was hoping if there was a way around it.

I will review the Plex Connect option as well as the comment from 2010mini. Which Synology app would this be? DS File or DS video? Not in front of my setup at the moment and wanted to utilise your knowledge before I get home.
 
Kennarded said:
The Apple TV was a gift and was hoping if there was a way around it.

I will review the Plex Connect option as well as the comment from 2010mini. Which Synology app would this be? DS File or DS video? Not in front of my setup at the moment and wanted to utilise your knowledge before I get home.
Click to expand...

another forum member answered this question:

ben5576 said:
Hi,

DS214play arrived today and 5 hours into the usual 'quick setup' for a complete numpty like me, I can confirm that you can definitely stream non supported media content directly to your ATV from the NAS. But it is not immediately apparent how.

Putting aside that actual setup of Video Station (on your mac) and DS Video (on your iphone) all I can do is reinforce Darkslide's comments on how to do this because it took me a fair few goes and a lot of swearing to get it right.

What you must do, is what Darkslide says. Don't do what I think is intuitive, which is to press the big play icon on the image of the video you have selected (on the detailed film information page he refers to), then go to the next screen (with the expected play/pause controls etc) then see the airplay icon on the right and click that. Doing this streams the movie to your phone and from your phone to the ATV as discussed above. You can test this by exiting the app and the playback stops. The same thing happens when following the same process on your mac.

But.... If you finally spot that there really is a *tiny* icon (and it's not an 'airplay' icon either) at the top right hand corner of the detailed movie information page and press this rather than the big play icon on the poster of the movie you want to play, then you will get a different screen with a play/stop control. If you get this, then you are streaming direct from the NAS to the ATV. As before, you can test this by switching off your phone and the playback continues.

I'm happily watching a .mkv being transcoded and streamed directly to my ATV as I type this.

Apologies if this seems to merely repeat what has been said previously, however I found this a really helpful thread in setting up my network and actually getting the DS214play to actually do 'what it says on the tin'. Thanks for all of your help.

Ben
Click to expand...
 
Kennarded said:
The Apple TV was a gift and was hoping if there was a way around it.



I will review the Plex Connect option as well as the comment from 2010mini. Which Synology app would this be? DS File or DS video? Not in front of my setup at the moment and wanted to utilise your knowledge before I get home.
Click to expand...


You would use DS Video. With the latest Synology upgrades you'd also want to install DS File. Plex won't take advantage of the neat transcoding capabilities of the Play models so running the Plex Media Server on your NAS will be very limiting. Mind you most files will only require remuxing so you might be ok with Plex Connect and the Plex Media Server on the NAS. The latest versions of the Synology OS run dnsmasq automatically which causes problems with Plex Connect. You can just telnet in and kill that process. There is a workaround but it seems tricky.
 
great, It just creates a shared iTunes Library, it does not do Home Sharing.
vfwi
 
bervidote said:
great, It just creates a shared iTunes Library, it does not do Home Sharing.Image
Click to expand...

The only work around to run iTunes without a dedicated PC is a hosted virtual machine running a copy of iTunes off the same disk. You can run Virtual Box completely headless with no GUI ;) A bit of a masochistic overkill but if you want to run iTunes purely as a service that's your option.

With a reasonably powerful smart NAS rather than just a dumb disk array you can run a headless iTunes server off of one. Something like a HP ProLiant MicroServer would do the trick, they're not very powerful, but if all you need is a copy of windows running iTunes in a VM it should do the trick.
 
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